Archive for Power Query

Back in December 2013, I created this post about the Global Population by seasons. I used some data I found on the web to work out what percentage of the world’s population enjoys summer in Dec, Jan, Feb each year (spoiler – it’s not many). The data I used in the post linked above is basically a 360 x 180 grid of data points, each box represents the population in a geographical area representing 1 degree longitude x 1 degree latitude. I was lying in bed this morning thinking about Excel (as you do) and it occurred to me that I could use Excel to create a grid of this data on one sheet, and I wondered what it would look like if I put Excel conditional formatting over the top of the data. Well to my pleasant surprise, it looked exactly liked I hoped it would – here it is.

I then realised that the reason the sea is green is because this space is filled with zeros – ie no one lives here. I decided to use Power Query to replace the zeros with Null values and redo the conditional formatting. This is what I got.